Tom Clancy's Power Plays 1 - 4

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by Tom Clancy


  The passenger cabin of a private jet over western Bolivia.

  Harlan DeVane stared out the window as his ascending plane pierced the clouds and the landscape below dissolved into far-reaching blankness.

  What had happened in Kazakhstan was truly regrettable, he thought. The Colombian and Peruvian leftists had paid him a large sum of money to settle their various grudges. As had the Albanian guerrillas ... as, unknown to them, had their sworn enemies in Belgrade. And there would have been a long line of future clients, many with sharply conflicting interests, all willing to abide by his insistence on neutrality and confidentiality. Just last week, when things had looked so promising, Iran and Iraq had both made generous offers meant to cause problems for each other. New York, Washington, Moscow, Baghdad, Teheran ... DeVane was quite the egalitarian when it came to selecting his targets of destruction, and would have been leasing time on the Havoc device for many weeks to come before an astronaut team could be sent up to disable it.

  He sighed. It was over, he had to concede that. Over for now. But he had never told his customers that success was a certainty, and he'd given Roger Gordian quite an initial workout, hadn't he?

  Really, it was best to look at the bright side.

  A world full of strife was a world full of profit, and DeVane saw no end in sight to either.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  ONE - VARIOUS LOCALES

  TWO - LA PAZ, BOLIVIA

  THREE - MONTEREY BAY, CALIFORNIA

  FOUR - BAJA PENINSULA, MEXICO

  FIVE - VARIOUS LOCALES

  SIX - SAN JOSE/SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEVEN - VARIOUS LOCALES

  EIGHT - VARIOUS LOCALES

  NINE - NATION CODE NAME: CAPE GREEN

  TEN - VARIOUS LOCALES

  ELEVEN - SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  TWELVE - SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  THIRTEEN - CALIFORNIA/VIRGINIA

  FOURTEEN - SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  FIFTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES

  SIXTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES

  SEVENTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES

  EIGHTEEN - CALIFORNIA

  NINETEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES

  TWENTY - VARIOUS LOCALES

  TWENTY-ONE - CALIFORNIA

  TWENTY-TWO - SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  TWENTY-THREE - VARIOUS LOCALES

  TWENTY-FOUR - NORTHERN ONTARIO, CANADA

  TWENTY-FIVE - VARIOUS LOCALES

  TWENTY-SIX - VARIOUS LOCALES

  EPILOGUE

  THE BESTSELLING NOVELS OF TOM CLANCY

  RAINBOW SIX

  John Clark is used to doing the CIA’s dirty work. Now he’s taking on the world. . . .

  “ACTION-PACKED.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  EXECUTIVE ORDERS

  The most devastating terrorist act in history leaves Jack Ryan as president of the United States. . . .

  “UNDOUBTEDLY CLANCY’S BEST YET.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  DEBT OF HONOR

  It begins with the murder of an American woman in the backstreets of Tokyo. It ends in war. . . .

  “A SHOCKER CLIMAX SO PLAUSIBLE YOU’LL WONDER WHY IT HASN’T YET HAPPENED.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

  The smash bestseller that launched Clancy’s career—the incredible search for a Soviet defector and the nuclear submarine he commands . . .

  “BREATHLESSLY EXCITING.”

  —The Washington Post

  RED STORM RISING

  The ultimate scenario for World War III—the final battle for global control . . .

  “THE ULTIMATE WAR GAME . . . BRILLIANT.”

  —Newsweek

  PATRIOT GAMES

  CIA analyst Jack Ryan stops an assassination—and incurs the wrath of Irish terrorists. . . .

  “A HIGH PITCH OF EXCITEMENT.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN

  The superpowers race for the ultimate Star Wars missile defense system. . . .

  “CARDINAL EXCITES, ILLUMINATES . . . A REAL PAGE-TURNER.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

  The killing of three U.S. officials in Colombia ignites the American government’s explosive, and top secret, response. . . .

  “A CRACKLING GOOD YARN.”

  —The Washington Post

  THE SUM OF ALL FEARS

  The disappearance of an Israeli nuclear weapon threatens the balance of power in the Middle East—and around the world. . . .

  “CLANCY AT HIS BEST . . . NOT TO BE MISSED.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  WITHOUT REMORSE

  The Clancy epic that fans have been waiting for. His code name is Mr. Clark. And his work for the CIA is brilliant, cold-blooded, and efficient . . . but who is he really?

  “HIGHLY ENTERTAINING.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  NOVELS BY TOM CLANCY

  The Hunt for Red October

  Red Storm Rising

  Patriot Games

  The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  Clear and Present Danger

  The Sum of All Fears

  Without Remorse

  Debt of Honor

  Executive Orders

  Rainbow Six

  The Bear and the Dragon

  Red Rabbit

  The Teeth of the Tiger

  SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare

  NONFICTION

  Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship

  Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment

  Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

  Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

  Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

  Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier

  Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

  Into the Storm: A Study in Command

  (written with General Fred Franks, Jr., Ret.)

  Every Man a Tiger

  (written with General Charles Horner, Ret.)

  Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

  (written with General Carl Stiner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY

  Splinter Cell

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Games of State

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Acts of War

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Balance of Power

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: State of Siege

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Divide and Conquer

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Line of Control

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mission of Honor

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Sea of Fire

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Call to Treason

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Hidden Agendas

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Night Moves

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Breaking Point

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Point of Impact

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: CyberNation

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: State of War

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Changing of the Guard

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Springboard

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND MARTIN GREENBERG

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Politika

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: ruthless.com

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Shadow Watch

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Bio-Strike

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cold War

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cutting Edge

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Zero Hour

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Wild Card<
br />
  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: BIO-STRIKE

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with RSE Holdings, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / November 2000

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by RSE Holdings, Inc.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00259-9

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Marc Cerasini, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq.; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan; and Doug Littlejohns, Kevin Perry, the rest of the Bio-Strike team, and the other fine folks at Red Storm Entertainment and Holistic Design. As always, I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  —Tom Clancy

  ONE

  VARIOUS LOCALES

  OCTOBER 7, 2001

  AMERICAN CITIES RUN BY THE CLOCK. THIS IS TRUEST of the largest and busiest, where the minute hand impels people through their routines without room for pause. The sleep-demolishing clatter of a five A.M. trash pickup, a breakneck dash to the subway, back-to-back conferences noted in a desk planner, business luncheons, happy hours, and more commuter sprints—these are distance markers on the constricted urban fast track, a daily marathon of appointments and schedules where it is only an apparent contradiction to say even the unpredictable occurs at predictable times.

  It was largely because of its precise adherence to schedule, its tidal inflow and outflow of humanity, that the New York Stock Exchange was chosen to be ground zero for the northeastern seaboard of the United States, the epicenter of an explosion that would be neither heard nor felt by the thousands of souls it overtook, yet was potentially more catastrophic than a full-scale nuclear assault.

  Inconspicuous as the weapon he was carrying, the man in the dark blue suit walked past the statue of George Washington in Federal Plaza to the impressive Greek Revival building on Wall Street amid a swarm of traders and clerks eager to make the opening bell. A tobacco-leather briefcase in his right hand, he climbed the broad outer stairs, passed under the stone pediment with its sculpted gods of finance and invention, and strode through the entrance onto the main trading floor. Once inside, he continued moving with the flood of conservatively dressed men and women as they pushed toward the brokerage booths, trading posts, and banks of phone and video monitors that linked the Exchange to the national and foreign market networks.

  Scanning the room, he discovered an unoccupied phone stall, jostled toward it, placed his briefcase on the floor near his feet, and lifted the receiver.

  His hand on the hook, he randomly keyed in a number and pretended to make a call.

  He would stand there waiting until the time was right.

  A few moments later, the bell rang out from the platform, and the nation’s most powerful engine of commerce jolted into high gear. The buzz of voices around him became an enthusiastic clamor, the loud outcries of stock auctioneers carrying up to the vaulted ceiling, tantalizing their bidders like bright flashes of gold and precious gems.

  He felt sure that no one was paying attention to him. He was invisible in his conformity, to all eyes just another securities professional touching base with his office as the early quotes hit the board.

  The silent phone cradled between his chin and shoulder, he leaned down and pushed a catch beside one of the briefcase’s combination locks. The latch did not snap open. Nor had that been his intent.

  Still bent over the case, he heard a low sound issue from its side panel.

  Hissssss.

  Like a venomous snake.

  The device was patterned after the modified attaché cases once found by authorities in the compound of Japanese Aum Shinrikyo terrorists, the same extremist cult responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway attack that killed a dozen riders and left over 5,000 people grievously injured from exposure to sarin nerve gas. Like the Aum’s delivery system, it had been contrived from a small aerosol canister, a battery-operated handheld fan, and a nozzle running to a camouflaged vent in the shell of the briefcase. His single improvement to their original design was the lock-catch triggering mechanism, which eliminated any need to raise the lid and reduced his chances of drawing unwanted attention.

  Lifting his case, the man in the dark blue suit hung up the receiver and stepped back into the crowd. Someone immediately shouldered past to take his place at the phone, scarcely noticing him. Good, he thought. In the general commotion, the expulsion of aerosol couldn’t be heard. He had only to wind his way around the room a bit, insuring the agent was spread throughout, and his job here would be finished. His targets would do the rest with their scrambling between appointments, their five-o’ clock cocktail gatherings, their close-packed bodies on homebound trains and buses. Mingling with coworkers, casual acquaintances, and friends, kissing their wives and hugging their children, going around and around in relentless, cyclical patterns of high-speed movement, they would very effectively do the rest.

  Soon he left the Exchange and turned onto Broad Street, the canister in his briefcase emptied of its unseen contents. In his mind, he could still hear the noise from the vents: hissssss.

  The memory raised the hairs at the back of his neck. He’d been guaranteed there was nothing to worry about, and the assignment had paid handsomely enough to help compensate for any lingering anxiety. Still, he was glad to be outside the building, and he welcomed even the thick, unseasonably warm air of Manhattan in fall ... knowing he hadn’t really left anything behind. Not anything that couldn’t follow him.

  If what he had released wasn’t already out there on the street, it would be.

  Soon enough, it would be everywhere.

  The Air Tractor AT-802 turboprop is a mainstay of the agricultural aviation industry and a common sight in the sky above central Florida, a region that accounts for almost 70 percent of the nation’s total citrus production. Aboard the plane is an 800-gallon hopper that may contain any of a wide range of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Pumps beneath the fuselage drive the chemical from the hopper into wing-mounted booms equipped with either special nozzles, in the case of liquids, or spreaders, in the case of solids, for spraying the vast groves of orange, grapefruit, lemon, and lime trees.

  On this particular morning, an AT-802 launched from a grass airstrip west of Clermont for a spray run with something worlds removed from the products normally used by ag pilots. To prevent its degradation in storage and transport, the material had been lyophilized, or freeze-dried, into an ultrafine, whitish powder that resembled confectioners’ sugar to the naked eye. The particles were then embedded in tiny granular spheres composed of a biodegradable organic compound, increasing their stability and ensuring a controlled and uniform rate of release. Perfectly smooth and free-flowing, the microcapsules rolled virtually without friction and would not acquire electrostatic charges that might make them cling to objects on which they alighted, enabling secondary dissemination of the
agent in breezes kicked up by weather, the wings of birds, or the tires of a Mack semi whipping down the interstate.

  Its manufacturer had wanted only the best and obtained it at the cost of millions, knowing his clients would find the product irresistible, and confident of an impressive return on his investment.

  The crop duster banked to the southwest now, maintaining a low altitude, flying across the wind. At his controls, its pilot could see the trees spread out beneath him, row after row seaming the fields to the extreme limit of his vision, their heavy green crowns jeweled with orange and yellow fruit that would soon be harvested, packaged, and shipped from coast to coast. On his panel were state-of-the-art GPS and GIS displays mapping the acreage to be covered in exact coordinates, displaying a stream of real-time data about outside environmental conditions, monitoring every aspect of his dispersal unit’s operation. According to the instruments, a meteorological inversion had kept a band of cool air close to the ground today, ideal weather because it would prevent the powder from drifting off target with warmer, rising air currents.

 

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